Independent-learning super-curriculum projects: reading, research and ideas shared by Perse students

Throughout 2016, there were a lot of news stories about the increase of women in positions of political power. Reuters wrote “May, Merkel, Clinton – the year of female leaders.” And the BBC’s headline says, “Are women taking over British Politics?” At the same time, I was reading Malala Yousafzai’s biography which includes information about how girls in Pakistan were being encouraged not to go to school. I wanted to know more about the rights and opportunities of women across the world, so I decided to investigate.

Oliver was awarded joint first prize in the Oxford University Spanish Short Story Writing Competition. His story was extremely well written, in Spanish that was accurate, authentic and natural. The judges also liked the story’s premise, which – as the story itself has it – ‘llamó la atención.’ It was a witty idea, elegantly realized.

I wrote this Python code because I wanted to create a program to convert to and from a made up language. It allows you to communicate with your friends in secret. A further improvement would be to make the language more random instead of 01~ = a, 02~ = b, etc.

We are a team of aspiring physicists from The Perse School, Cambridge. Our aim is to honour the ingenuity of previous generations of particle physicists whilst simultaneously inspiring a new generation in schools today. The opportunity to be able to share our work with many people and get them excited about particle physics and STEM subjects is one which we would relish. We have designed, built and tested a cloud chamber that can be constructed from materials available in most schools. We propose using our cloud chamber to recreate a number of the most fundamental and revolutionary historical experiments at CERN. We intend to share the images we record online and crowdsource their analysis, allowing physics students from around the world to join our experiment.

What is astrobiology? Astrobiology is a true melting pot of scientific fields. It is the study of the origin, evolution and distribution of life within the universe; astrobiologists must consider how life can arise, survive and thrive on a planetary body. As perhaps the only field of study yet to prove that its subject matter actually exists, the field is at the forefront of scientific research. In the article, written for the Young Scientists’ Journal (YSJ), I discuss abiogenesis on Earth, our earliest ancestors and the search for life on Mars, Europa and Enceladus.